“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.”
Sigmund Freud
Focuses on unconscious processes as they are manifested in your present behaviour.
The goals of psychodynamic therapy are to gain self-awareness and understanding of the influence of the past on present behaviour. The psychodynamic approach enables you to examine unresolved conflicts and symptoms that arise from past dysfunctional relationships and manifest themselves in the present. It involves looking into events from the past and the effects those events had on you, as a way of gathering information and insight into why you behave in certain ways in the present. Thus allowing you to recognise reaction at the moment that is triggered by these past events, so you can map it back to that event, and in doing so you have the freedom to choose a different reaction.
Psychodynamic therapy is the oldest of the modern therapies. (Freud’s psychoanalysis is a specific form and subset of psychodynamic therapy), and so relies on a theory of human development and interaction.
